Blow’s account of growing up in rural Louisiana, exposed to
negligence, sexual molestation, violence, and loss focuses on a child’s
strategies of survival first, and then on sexual confusion, social ambition,
and discovery of the gifts that led him to his life as a writer for the New York Times. A major theme in the memoir is his learning
to claim his bisexuality after years of secrecy and shame. That emergent fact about his identity, along
with moving to New York after a life in the rural South required an unusual
level of self-reflection and hard, costly choices that challenged norms at
every level. His account of learning to
assume a leadership role in a college fraternity and deciding to finally leave it behind
offers a particularly vivid example of what it takes to resist perpetuating
rites of humiliation and conformity designed to curb individuation.